


Don’t fear the dark ‘cause I’m your dawn

by mjonesing (klassmartin)



Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banana Pancakes are the ultimate I will hear no arguments, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Relationship, Sappy, roommates au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27606938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klassmartin/pseuds/mjonesing
Summary: “No matter what, I have your back. Even when it seems like there’s no one else around… If you can count on anything, you can count on me.”Peter finally, finally smiles, and when he speaks, his breath wafts over her lips like a promise. “Hey, MJ?”“Yeah?”“Ditto.”She rolls her eyes but snuggles closer still, her nose brushing against his, the possibility that he might kiss her singing gospel in her chest. “Get your own profound sentiment.”—————Or: The apartment is too quiet. Michelle goes to investigate.
Relationships: Michelle Jones/Peter Parker
Comments: 24
Kudos: 56





	Don’t fear the dark ‘cause I’m your dawn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iovewords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iovewords/gifts).



> HAPPY BIRTHDAY IOVEWORDS! 💚
> 
> Wow. All the fluff today. It’s truly a wonderful day! This fic is based completely on ‘Enough for You’ by Joshua Radin. Go listen; you're welcome.

The midday sun has this inconvenient habit of slanting through her curtains to hit the precise spot her head lays every time she tries to sleep in.

It’s not the first time she’s considered moving out just because of this one minor inconvenience. She’s even mentioned it to Peter a few times, usually when she’s hungover and yet to have any caffeine, and he always tilts his head just so and says, “We can switch rooms, if it bothers you so much.”

“You’re only saying that because you want the bigger closet,” she’ll respond, and Peter will roll his eyes and put her Winnie the Pooh mug in front of her, filled to the brim with the strongest coffee he can find from the artisanal store on the other side of town.

Coffee. That sounds nice about now.

The grey carpet is soft beneath her feet - is it grey on purpose, or just from age? It’s a question she hopes to never have the answer to - and she shivers into her robe, scratching at the silk scarf that is working double duty today in keeping her ears warm. Note to her drunken self: just because you’re sweating from a night on the town does  _ not  _ mean you should turn off the heating in the middle of November. 

The apartment is strangely quiet as she enters the living area. This time when she shivers, it is not because of the broken thermostat; the warmth her roommate emits is missing from the sofa or pottering about in the kitchen.

“Peter?” she calls as she looks around. There is no answer, which means a miracle has occurred; Peter Parker has actually gotten some damn sleep.

He has to be up and out in an hour or two for his job, so she sets herself the task of making the morning coffee. The machine groans in protest, a noise they’ve been politely ignoring because replacing it will cost more than they can manage. Michelle pats the top of it in sympathy and goes to the cupboard, pulling out her favourite and Peter’s ancient, faded mug of choice, the poor thing having seen so many washes that if it weren’t for knowing Peter better than he perhaps knows himself, she would have no idea what the design is supposed to be.

Her stomach growls pointedly. Michelle sighs lazily before rummaging through the cupboards. They’re due a grocery run so there’s not much in the way of supplies, but there’s eggs and flour and enough milk for a decent batch of pancakes. There’s even a banana, not quite overripe, which means she gets to wake her best friend up with his favourite breakfast in the whole wide world.

She’s not the best at making them, but she knows enough that she manages to fill his plate with the best of the batch. His Aunt May is a terrible cook but a fantastic pancake maker; every time Michelle’s had the privilege of joining them for breakfast, May’s pancakes never fail to impress. They’re soft and fluffy and a perfect golden brown, and best of all, they’re always in a strange and wonderful shape.

Michelle’s are just rough circles. They’ll have to make do.

She tucks the plates into the oven to keep warm and carries his mug back to the hallway, bending down to blow the steam and the smell into his room through the crack in the door. On a typical morning it’s enough to rouse him, but no awakening sounds meet her ears.

The sudden wave of fright that surges in her gut almost has her spilling the scalding liquid straight onto her chilly fingers.

How is it only now her brain is registering this as strange? Peter Parker, perpetual insomniac and early riser, yet she beats him out of bed despite her lazy morning?

Her knuckles rap gently on the peeling paint of his bedroom door. “Peter? Are you in there?”

The hinges squeak as she grasps the door handle and eases her way in. The curtains dance in the breeze that slips through the open window, a messy trail leading the way from the fire escape to the lump that huddles beneath the duvet. 

Michelle sees the discarded, bloody gauze, the abandoned first aid kit with it’s contents strewn across the floor, and the crumpled and dirty ball of tech that makes up his suit. She sees it and her heart hurts, the way it always does when she realises that she’d slept through the moments he needs her most.

In the many years that Michelle has been friends with Peter, they’ve lived together for four and she’s known his secret for six. At the time, when she was sixteen and awkward and nursing a crush the size of Canada on one of her only friends, Peter being Spiderman was  _ almost  _ pretty cool. She lived on the surface of it, waving him out instead of welcoming him back, making fun of the skintight fabric and readily forwarding Spidey memes and video compilations of his more embarrassing moments. Despite the occasional credible threat, it was easy to pretend that all Peter really did when he put on the suit was to basically become another tourist attraction.

It wasn’t until she moved in with him that she found out just how damaging it all could be.

She has a front row seat to the worst show in town. She gets to see the repercussions - the injuries, the recovery, the nightmares and the sacrifices, the toll it takes on him living a relatively normal life. She knows from the way he crawls through the window whether he’s had a good patrol or a bad one. She’s patched up too many wounds to count, has listened to the things he can say and only imagined the things he cannot, and has learnt with no amount of uncertainty that no other person - past, present or future, in any universe - is as truly good as the boy who sleeps on the other side of the wall.

She is so devastatingly proud of him.

(She is also heartwrenchingly in love with him.

If the feeling wasn’t so damn all-consuming, she’d find the whole narrative worthy of a trashy novel that gets thrown straight in the clearance bin.)

Michelle picks her way across the room to avoid the creaking floorboards, dropping his mug off on the bedside table as she perches on the edge of the mattress. The lump does not stir, so she reaches to what she suspects is a shoulder and shakes gently. No answer comes, but her ears prick up with the almost silent sound of a hitched breath. At the very least, at least she knows he’s alive.

“Peter, I bought you coffee,” she singsongs with a cheerful bravado worthy of an Oscar. 

Minutes pass with no response, tugging at her heart until she considers what can really be defined as ‘drastic action.’

It’s too late, however. Her hands work independently of her mental anguish; they have the duvet pulled up and her body slipping in before she can register what is happening.

The bed is warm with his body heat, seeping through the toweling of her robe and warming the chill in her toes. She settles into the right side of the bed like it’s her own, tucking the flattened pillow just so until it props her up to the desired height. Inside his cocoon, she can see the even rise and fall of his bare back; can smell that he didn’t shower before collapsing into bed at whatever hour he made it home. Worst of all, she sees the thick layer of bandages that consume the entire right side of his torso, applied messily in places like he hadn’t been able to reach.

It’s just further proof of what she already knew; he’d needed someone last night, and she’d been busy dreaming of museum dates and the indescribable feel of holding the hand of the person you love for the very first time.

She traces over the crumpled medical tape with a quivering hand, intent on making a mental note to refresh his first aid training instead of focusing on the red spots that bloom at the centre of the wad of gauze.

Beneath her touch she feels the first hints of life - a twitch, like she’s tickled him. She holds her breath and does it again, almost finding the humour in how he flinches this time, retracting from her fingers but immediately pressing back into her touch.

“You should have woken me,” she whispers, shifting closer until she can smell his shampoo from beneath the sweat and ash, “I’m clearly much better than you at fixing you up.”

_ You’re better than me at everything _ , is what he should say - what he always says when he wants to make her gooey inside like an eclair - but Peter remains stubbornly silent, even as her traitorous hand begins to stray further north.

“I bought you coffee,” she continues anyway, the pad of her middle finger tracing over the vertebrae of his spine. “And there’s pancakes in the oven. I even made them into a special shape for you.”

His shoulder twitches up in a silent question.

“They look pretty life-like as well.” She chuckles under her breath. “Very realistic moons.”

Finally, a flash of Peter Parker appears as she feels the mattress shake with his quiet laugh.

“Scale?”

Peter sighs and croaks out, “8.”

“The same?” His head bobs and a hand reaches for her, contact that she readily accepts as she threads their fingers together. She moves closer until her chest almost touches his back, following his direction when he tugs her towards him, placing her hand over his heart. 

He’s always a little softer after nightmares but never quite so down, something she wants to attribute to the addition of being hurt even though she’s struggling to convince herself. Either way, the selfish, head-over-heels part of her is thrilled with the development, begging to pull him closer, to explore the soft skin beneath her palm, to do unspeakable things that belong in her secret dreams.

There’s a bigger part of her though; the one that is Peter’s friend above all else and no matter what. That is the part that pulls on his shoulder in a silent request to see his face. If there’s anything that will settle the uncontrollable levels of concern that flare in her bloodstream, it’s seeing his dark brown eyes looking into hers.

The image that meets her will be forever burnt into her eyelids. The green bruises look bad enough now they’ve had the night to age, but the thought of how bad they must have once been makes her chest tight like a vice. In an instant she knows he’s been deliberately hiding this from her. It hurts to think he felt he had to; that no matter how bad it gets he wouldn’t turn to her in his time of need. 

“I didn’t want you to worry,” he says to the look on her face, “You’ve got enough going on with that potential job and I just…”

“You are an idiot, Peter Parker.”

She doesn’t ask what happened. She won’t learn anything more from making him relive the tale than she can later on from the news alert she keeps a constant vigil over. Instead, she traces over the mottled skin with a feather light touch, and when he takes her hand in his to hold to his heart once more, it emboldens her to lean close and press a soft kiss to what she’s sure was once a fractured cheekbone.

When she withdraws, Peter’s eyes have fluttered closed and remain that way for a long moment. His heartbeat has increased tenfold and the possibilities begin to swirl into beautiful pictures in her mind, fuzzy outlines beginning to focus into the recognisable forms of two people doing all the things she’s tried so hard not to want.

“Peter?”

“Mm.”

“If you ever try to hide anything like this from again, I will tell your little avenging buddies how much you like to gossip about them after two glasses of wine.”

Peter nods, trying very hard to remain serious. “Okay, MJ.”

“And Peter?”

“Yes?”

“You know I’m here for you, right?” Her voice is so small that Peter gravitates towards her, forehead resting against hers as his arm snakes around her waist. “No matter what, I have your back. Even when it seems like there’s no one else around… If you can count on anything, you can count on me.”

Peter finally,  _ finally  _ smiles, and when he speaks, his breath wafts over her lips like a promise. “Hey, MJ?”

“Yeah?”

“Ditto.”

She rolls her eyes but snuggles closer still, her nose brushing against his, the possibility that he might kiss her singing gospel in her chest. “Get your own profound sentiment.”

“But yours was so beautifully put,” he says with a hidden laugh. “I mean, how do you top that? No one will ever say anything as amazing and eloquent as that was. Really makes me feel better about getting shot, like it’s not so bad -”

Michelle’s eyes spring open. 

“You got shot?!”

**Author's Note:**

> The final line of MJ’s ‘santiment’ is straight from the song that inspired this fic, because it was almost the title and I wanted to use it somewhere. 
> 
> @mjonesing on Tumblr as always.


End file.
